High quality scholarship over at AEI "Robert J. Waldmann of Columbia University complemented these findings by using another measure of inequality. In a 1992 article for the Quarterly Journal of Economics he examined pairs of countries in which the poor (defined as the lower 20 percent of household income distribution) had equal real incomes but where the rich (defined as the top 5 percent of the household income distribution) in one country were much wealthier than in the other. He found that the infant mortality rate was higher in the half of the pair in which the rich households were wealthier."

I did not use pairs of countries but rather OLS on a cross section. Also I do not work at Columbia University. Still I am very flattered to be criticized in "The Public Interest."

Robert Waldmann
Universita' di Roma "Tor Vergata" Facolta' di Economia Via Columbia 2 00177 RM Italy.